posted by Jim Forsyth, photo credit Shutterstock Images
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3 years ago

It looks like the latest culture war over Texas high school textbooks will end not with a bang, but with a whimper.

1200 WOAI news reports the fourteen textbook publishers have submitted their proposals for the next round of high school biology textbooks, and they include no mention of 'creationism,' or 'intelligent design.'

"For the most part, they stuck with established mainstream science and have not watered down the textbooks," said Dan Quinn, an education analyst with the Texas Freedom Network, a liberal group.

There had been indications that conservatives on the State Board of Education would be pushing for alternatives to the theory of evolution, including mention of Biblical theories of creation, and the theory that humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time, in the next round of books.

Later, several conservatives denied that, saying those claims were made by one of many textbook reviewers and were being promoted by the Texas Freedom Network as a way to make conservative Christians look 'weird' and 'out of the mainstream.'

Quinn says the bottom line is that the books move away from the theory that Big Tex and T-Rex roamed the Texas plains together.

"They looked at the objections the reviewers made, and they refused to make changes by adding discredited arguments that the evolutionists want in the science textbooks," Quinn said.

The battle is not over. State Education Commissioner Michael Williams still has to sign off on the textbooks, and then the full State Board of Education will vote to approve them or demand changes at its November meeting.

Two years ago, conservatives on the SBOE made national news when they demanded, and for the most part received, changes in civics and government textbooks, increasing mentions of conservative figures in Texas and U.S. history.